Here’s the problem—your company needs to change. Your people need to be more customer focused, more innovative, able to work collaboratively across countries and time zones. They need new tools, new language, and new frameworks. And it all needs to happen fast. This is a common problem for many companies, and one that many companies find difficult to solve.
In a 2014 Innosight executive survey, only 36 percent of respondents from large companies said that they were confident they could transform their organizations 5 to 10 years out. And many organizations need to change more quickly than that.
The challenge is one of transformation and evolution— for individual leaders and for organizations. It’s providing learning with impact, and importantly, at scale.
Linking Learning and Change
There’s no shortage of content available to thirsty learners, thanks to the explosion of online courses and high-quality videos available via TED talks and MOOC providers such as edX and Coursera. The challenge is linking this standalone learning with specific applications to organizational change.
Consider these examples:
- A large professional services firm wants to give its partners new tools and approaches to enhance the conversations they have with clients. The partners want to apply these tools to specific client problems as a way of improving client relationships and providing higher levels of insight for the client.
- A major pharmaceuticals company launches a customer centricity initiative, linking its practical approaches with recent research and engaging in a live discussion on applications with 500 of the company’s leaders.
Both of these examples use learning as a means to a business end. They require acquisition and application of new frameworks to drive better business results—in the context of the specific business concerned. And they do it at scale, addressing the learning needs of hundreds of participants at a time.
Since 1959, when Donald Kirkpatrick first published his Four-Level Training Evaluation Model, the highest goal of corporate learning has always been impact—learning has little use to a company if it’s not applied. Recent advances in technology, from YouTube to MOOCs, have increased the amount of content available to learners with a few clicks. But as the range of choice increases, so does the danger of fragmentation—companies need to be aligned in their vision and approach. To achieve impact, learners need to have shared experiences, not individual learning moments.
This is what has always made cohort-based programs so attractive and effective. They create shared experiences among a group of company leaders, and can pave the way for ongoing relationships and collaborations across global, functional, and divisional boundaries. And the best programs bring the specific context of that organization for greater relevance and impact of the learning experience.
In the past, cohort sizes have been limited—usually less than 100 participants in a program, and often as few as 20 or 25. Within these small group cohorts, learning objectives range from skill building and mindset change to networking and strategic alignment. But when you can push the limits on size and reach hundreds or thousands of leaders at the same time, the ability to change an entire organization increases exponentially.
But a large cohort, with 250 to 700 people within the same organization, is not simply a replica of a small cohort. It has to be specifically designed to acknowledge and leverage the large numbers of participants.
Choosing Between Large and Small Cohorts
A large cohort certainly will look and feel different to participants than a small cohort program. The opportunity for individual attention is lower with large cohorts, and, simply because of their size, there are limitations on the learning tools that can be employed. For example, debriefing case studies or using class time to share experience across small work groups must be more limited when 500 people are in the virtual classroom. Small cohorts are still the best venue for leaders to transform mindsets, build strong bonds, foster collaboration among a group, and, together, achieve business impact. As with a seminar course, the range of tools available for learning is greater in a small cohort program, and the ability for all participants to engage is higher.
But there are instances when a large cohort may be the optimal choice and pushing the limits on scale can work. Our experience points to two situations where larger cohorts have proven to be a successful approach.
- When an organization is looking to facilitate its change management efforts around organizational alignment. For example, a new strategic directive to redefine the customer experience is being embraced and each business will need to refocus. This can be an excellent application for large cohort. In fact, we’ve used the large cohort approach in conjunction with the more targeted small cohort approach in these situations (with the large cohorts, in effect, helping to “cascade” the learning throughout the organization after smaller cohort programs were targeted at the top of the pipeline).
- When an organization is looking to sustain and build on the learning investment it has made in prior programs. Grouping “graduates” into a large cohort can be a great way to keep the learning as a focus and maintain community.
Both of these applications share the common goal of quickly enabling large groups within the organization to have a shared conversation.
Whether your goal is corporate transformation or leadership training, your learners need to be exposed to new frameworks and concepts, they need to internalize them, and they need to practice their application. Thanks to new technologies and approaches, large cohort programs can allow hundreds of people to share the same tailored experience, reflect on it, draw on key insights, and apply it in their work. When the right elements are in place, large-scale programs allow companies to make dramatic changes at high speed.
MaryAnne Amato is senior Learning Solutions manager at Harvard Business Publishing, where she architects world-class leadership development programs in partnership with clients. She drives organizational impact by aligning participant-centered learning to key business strategies, with a focus on measurement. Amato was previously the managing director of Research for Strategic Management (RSM), where for 12 years she led numerous Fortune 100 engagements focused on talent management in all its forms, including management development, leadership development, performance management, succession planning, assessment, and selection. Prior to RSM, Amato headed the organization development efforts of TIAA-CREF, where she was key in the organization redesign of the marketing and shared services organizations toward a customer centric philosophy. She began her career at MetLife, where she managed the employee engagement process.
Eric Mankin is director of Global Delivery at Harvard Business School Publishing where he is responsible for the development and delivery of virtual executive education programs to executives and leaders worldwide. His recent work with clients has been recognized with several gold “Learning in Practice” awards given annually by CLO Magazine. Mankin brings more than 25 years of experience in professional services and entrepreneurship to his work at Harvard Business Publishing. Prior to joining HBP, Mankin was the executive director of the Innovation and Corporate Entrepreneurship Research Center at Babson College’s School of Executive Education. He also worked with the City of Boston to design and implement its Hubway bike-sharing program, which served as the blueprint for New York’s Citi Bike system.
